The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (10 page)

Walter’s will – proved at below £1500 – was hardly sufficient to sustain a family. Worse, relations with old Mrs Druce – never the most cordial – broke down in a series of bitter arguments, reaching a peak when Anna Maria quarrelled with the family over the administration of T. C. Druce’s will. In
the end, the money ran out, and Anna Maria and her young family were left with no choice but to enter that most bleak of Victorian institutions: the workhouse.

In February 1884 – a month of coldly bright dawns and colder drizzle – Anna Maria entered the forbidding gates of the institution on Northumberland Street officially known as the ‘Marylebone Workhouse’, and unofficially as ‘the Spike’. At the time when Anna Maria arrived, the Marylebone Workhouse had moved on from earlier in the century, when its most hated and feared Master, Richard Ryan, was dismissed for beating female inmates senseless. Nevertheless, it remained the largest workhouse in London and a grim and chilling place.

The procedure for the reception and incarceration of workhouse inmates barely varied from institution to institution. On arrival at the workhouse gates, Anna Maria would have been placed in a reception room, disrobed and thoroughly scrubbed to get rid of germs. Her clothes would have been taken away and ticketed, and then she herself would have been dressed in the standard female workhouse uniform – a gown in a print known as the ‘workhouse stripe’, covered by a white shift, bonnet and shawl. She and the children would have been separated. Meals were served in a hall at wooden trestle tables, the men and women separated in long, silent rows that permitted no conversation. Admonitions from the scriptures frowned down in scarlet-lettered anger from the blue walls in the gaslight, with such exhortations to reflection and self-improvement as, ‘G
OD
IS
G
OOD
’, ‘G
OD
IS
T
RUE
’ or, perhaps the most open to question in the eyes of the inmates, ‘G
OD
IS
M
ERCIFUL
’. Regularly on the hour
came the clang of the workhouse bell, tolling out the course of the day’s activities, from rising and the daily roll-call at 6 a.m. to lights out at 8 p.m., when the inmates would gossip and whisper tales in their communal dormitories of their lives ‘outside’, in the gaps between the heavy footfalls of the patrolling night attendant.

If Anna Maria’s lot was wretched at this point in time, so too was that of the rest of Walter’s family. Florence, the eldest daughter, was put out to work as a general servant with a family in Willesden. Sidney and Walter, the two sons, were apprenticed as sailors; Walter stayed on the training ship HMS
Exmouth
, while Sidney decamped for Australia in 1895. Marguerite, an invalid, stayed with Anna Maria, while Nina, the youngest, was sent to board at the Field Lane Industrial School in Hampstead, a missionary establishment where well-meaning evangelicals attempted to instil Christian virtues in the unruly street urchins committed to their care. Not long after his transfer to HMS
Exmouth
, Anna Maria’s younger son, Walter, fell sick and was moved to the Workhouse Infirmary at Rackham Street in Ladbroke Grove. He died there in 1891, at the age of fourteen. Despite Anna Maria’s pleading, the recalcitrant old Mrs Druce could not be persuaded to give her grandson a decent burial. The Druce vault at Highgate remained firmly shut, and the child was buried in a pauper’s grave. Anna Maria never forgave the slight: ‘Yes, yes, it’s a vile conspiracy against me and mine!’ she would cry to the assembled pressmen, shaking her fist and swearing to have the dead child Walter reinterred in his rightful place. ‘That will be exhumation number two, but, if necessary, I will exhume and exhume until I get my rights!’

By August 1898, however, dark memories of the workhouse seemed to belong to the distant past. Anna Maria was now the toast of London, indeed the entire country. Journalists fought over her for exclusive interviews; she was on the guest list of every fashionable hostess in town. Old Mrs Druce was finally out of the way, dead and buried in 1893. Herbert Druce had been exposed as illegitimate in the pages of the popular press, every man on the street aware of the fact that the old man of Baker Street had produced several offspring before he finally made an honest woman of his mistress. Most importantly, as far as Anna Maria was concerned, Herbert was now considered a bounder, who refused to allow a simple step to be taken – the inspection of his father’s grave – that would speedily clear up the whole affair.

Recently, Mrs Druce had even been approached by City financiers proposing to issue bonds to the public to fund her case. It was a most attractive proposition, given that Mrs Marler, the landlady of her lodgings in Tavistock Square, was at that moment hammering on her door for nine months’ unpaid rent. Mrs Marler had, unsportingly, refused to accept a future invitation to Welbeck Abbey in lieu of ready money. Mrs Druce’s lawyers had shaken their heads at the idea of auctioning shares in the outcome of her case, warning that if she did proceed with such a plan, they would be unable to continue to represent her interests. But Anna Maria did not care for the warnings of old men. Her opponents were evidently alarmed, and that was what mattered. In the past few months she had been approached by the legal representatives of both the Duke of Portland and Herbert Druce, with offers to settle the case for upwards of £60,000, which she had refused.
*5
Six judges had already decided in favour of her application to open the grave, and three courts had ruled for her.
†6
How could she fail to win?

Mrs Druce could not, of course, possibly have guessed at the ominous wind that was even then gathering across the sea, and which was about to swallow her into a whirlpool from which there was little, if any, hope of escape.

*1
  
The fact that the duke’s representatives had taken such a step was not known until decades after the events.

†2
  
No birth or baptismal certificate for T.
C. Druce has ever been found.

*3
  
The law terms were (and still are) Hilary, Easter, Trinity and Michael-mas. The long vacation (when London was the most empty) extended from 10
August to 24 October.

*4
  
Florence Druce’s birth date was usually given in census and other official documents as ‘about 1874’, instead of the actual year of 1873, and her age was generally stated as a year younger than she really was. This disguised the fact that she was born only eight months after the marriage of her parents, as shown on her birth certificate.

*5
  
E
normous sums for the day,
worth over £6 million in today’s money.

†6
  
It is a remarkable fact that Mrs Druce, making allegations which on the face of them appeared to be highly improbable, managed to convince every judge before whom she found herself that she had a
prima facie
case.

If a scandal of more than usual piquancy occurs in high life, or a crime of extraordinary horror figures among our
causes
célèbres
, the sensationist is immediately at hand to weave the incident into a thrilling tale.

Quarterly Review
, 1863

The man from the
Star
shuddered and retreated further into his muffled greatcoat against the damp December chill that permeated the crooked streets. Even though it was early morning, a smoky veil already hung over the house tops, a dense and heavy yellow fog that condensed in oily drops on the windowpanes. The
Star
man recalled with grim amusement how, like Esther in
Bleak House
, on setting foot for the first time in London, he had asked the driver of the stagecoach whether there ‘was a great fire anywhere?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ had come the sniggering reply. ‘This is a London Particular. A fog, yer know.’ London fogs – also known as ‘pea soupers’ – were made up of a thick greenish-yellow or black smog that hung like an almost permanent veil over the City skyline. They were caused by a combination of soot and sulphur dioxide released from the burning of millions of coal fires, together with the mist and fog of the Thames Valley. The
Star
man smiled to himself at the recollection of his
youthful innocence. His confusion over the London fog had occurred when he was but a youngster, newly arrived in the capital from a sleepy village. Now of course, although still young in years, he was a wise old hack in terms of worldly experience, expertly steering his course through the winding alleys with no heed to the thick swirls of the pea souper that wreathed around him.

Even at this early hour, Fleet Street was abuzz with activity. Indeed, in those days, it was a street that never slept. All around the
Star
man, crammed into every available building, were newspaper offices: the
Daily News
in Bouverie Street, the
Daily Telegraph
in Peterborough Court, his own newspaper, the
Star
, in Stonecutter Street. Towering over Shoe Lane was the stately pile of the
Standard
, while the
Morning Advertiser
confronted the
Daily Chronicle
on opposite sides of the thoroughfare. Further away, aloof from the rabble,
The Times
stood in gloomy isolation under the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, like a mournful reminder of a bygone age: the only morning newspaper whose offices were not within the immediate precincts of Fleet Street. The entire area was dotted with newspaper offices, and it was impossible to turn left or right without being confronted by a publication of some kind: religious, comic, sporting and society newspapers; papers of every conceivable political persuasion and platform – conservative, radical, liberal, historical or just plain heretical. Every garret, cellar and attic room, it seemed, was occupied by some pale-faced correspondent, busily wiring telegrams to his editor in Chicago or Cork in the dim light of a gas jet, racing against the deadline of the approaching dawn.

The roots of the Fleet Street frenzy of the 1890s dated back earlier than the
Star
man could remember. In all probability it had started with the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers in 1855, the doing away with the old ‘tax on knowledge’. For from that moment onwards, the established sixpenny papers – led by the venerable
Times
– had been subject to fierce assault from a battery of new publications, costing a mere penny or even halfpenny apiece. The
Daily News
, the
Daily Telegraph
,
Pall Mall Gazette
,
Sun
,
Daily Chronicle
,
Star
–
such papers represented but a handful of the quarrelling upstarts that had sprung up over the past twenty years, and which now jostled for space on Fleet Street. These were a new generation of newspapers for a new generation of readers: young folk, the first in their families to read and write, brought to the gates of learning in the Board Schools established by Forster’s Education Act.
*1
This new and eager readership of clerks, tea boys and housemaids – often clubbing together to share a battered penny paper between them – preferred thrills to politics, inclining more towards devouring the gory details of the Whitechapel Murders than mulling over the knotty issues of Irish Home Rule. Savvy, sensation-seeking and worldly wise, they sought a savvy, sensational, worldly wise kind of journalism; and the new newspapers provided them with the diet for which they hungered. In America, the pages of the ‘yellow press’ owned by media magnates such as Randolph Hearst were full of stories of crimes, adventures and family sagas. They also employed new reporting techniques, such as interviews and investigative journalism. Inspired by this, the British newspapers in the 1880s followed suit. From the popular freaks of the penny fairs – bearded ladies, dwarves and Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man – to the lurid waxworks of the newly established Madame Tussaud’s with its notorious Chamber of Horrors, the Victorians delighted in everything that was grim, ghoulish and grotesque. Their newspapers did not disappoint them.

Of course, as the
Star
man himself would have acknowledged, had he put his mind to it as he padded down the street, it had all started off very admirably indeed, with a laudable and messianic zeal to educate and entertain the masses. As the great founder of the
Star
himself, the Irish Nationalist MP Thomas Power O’Connor, had declared on the front page of the newspaper’s first issue: ‘The rich, the privileged, the prosperous need no guardian or advocate; the poor, the weak, the beaten require the work and word of every humane man and woman to stand between them and the world.’